I want to build my own CMS

Soooo, you wanna to build your own , handcrafted CMS, eh? Well let me tell ya something. Don’t.

Unless you have a team behind you – and by team I mean not cheerleaders who will say “yes! go ahead, thats awesome idea. Everything sucks and is hard to use. do it, do it”, but actual people that will help you build that thing. – or you want to do it because you want to learn something during the process – don’t

I love the idea of an open source CMS and so on, but it has one problem. It’s universal tool with lots of options and people usually don’t need to use ALL of them. So in the end, most users are simply lost when they try to use them. Or worst, they ask what this option is for. And the answer creates new questions, and after few Q&A client is saying “ok let’s stop here, I’m stupid, you win”. OR client log in for the first time and later refuse to use that thing.

So I was very ambitious once, I mean I still am, but now I know my limits and I know the problems, and for the past few years I tried to create something for my clients that will be easy to use, without all those unnecessary things. Everything was great. Then I evolved and learned new stuff. My needs changes, my clients needs changed. It was time for next step. New version. And then time passed and it happened again. This. Is. Neverending. Story.

The latest version was supposed to be the piece of art. I was super excited, had many ideas about the workflow and basically how to make my work easier. But then it hit me. You are wasting your time. But to be honest, it was there all the time, but very quiet and I didn’t want to listen, because I just wanted to do it. Ambition is good but also not good if used in wrong place ;o)

If you have your own business, when you don’t do client work, you don’t make money. It’s that simple. So when there was money, I could work on my things (mostly CMS). Then the money ended, stress level got higher (cause you know, NO MONEY), so more work and more work and now there is nothing more than work. But that ends now.

Open Source CMS are great. I will tell this to myself like mantra. Like WordPress for example. Although it has many things that could/should be different or work out of the box, but I have no choice. Either I will kill myself by working too much or I just simply try to live a bit now.

Nonetheless I don’t have any regrets. Building your own software is the best way to learn. Of course if you do it because you want to solve a problem, and not because you think it’s a good idea. So you may expect lots of wordpress related posts coming up. But hey, I will finally have some time to write those posts.

So if you think about creating your own CMS, think again, and again. And if you still want to do it, don’t forget about security and performance and choose your framework wisely.